[camlorn]

You have two options. You aren't going to like either, I suspect. There may be a third, but I don't know it.

First is an ftp client. I recommend winscp. Your host provider should allow ftp access. You get that, and it acts like windows explorer: click a file to open, and when you press save in the text editor it automatically reuploads. Winscp has a built-in text editor, don't know if it's any good, but it can be reconfigured to use the text editor of your choice. You don't have to drag and drop, etc. You then go to the ssh client of your choice and type whatever the build command is, and test. So, winscp, a good text editor with syntax highlighting or whatever it is that people can see like to have, and an ssh client. You can't really test locally with this option.

The second option is a git repository, or a subversion repository, or fill-in-the-blank repository. There's bitbucket which is free, and no one can see your code unless you explicitly allow it, and that's what the mud I'm coding for is using. You can get an eclipse plugin to pull the repository, make your changes and then push the repository. Check it out on the machine running the mud when you're ready to upgrade.

To compile and test locally, you need cygwin, most likely. If you don't use anything like sql, etc, and just the standard flat files a lot of merc/diku/rom muds use, you can do this. Eclipse can compile with cygwin, but the issue here will be starting the mud. I don't know enough about eclipse to know if you can start the mud without opening a shell: eclipse likes to impose a directory structure, and most muds have the directories hard-coded. I suspect you'll either have to read eclipse documentation to make the current directory something besides the default (definitely doable, don't ask me how), or change the mud to play nice with whatever eclipse expects. If you try playing with this, you need the eclipse cdt and cygwin (not part of eclipse) or, if you're lucky enough to have a mud that compiles in visual studio, you can maybe get away with mingw. If your mud uses databases, setup is a bit trickier on a windows machine, and I wish you luck.

Finally, there are various text editors that have built-in ftp clients.

Testing locally is going to be very very painful. Probably about as painful as testing on the server, and if you test on the server, you know that it works on the server. I'd not bother, unless there's some reason to do so besides a desire to, or unless it compiles with visual studio and microsoft's toolchains. There's a lot of setup with doing that, and it'll be difficult if the mud uses mysql and such (unless you already know how to set all that up on windows...).